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‘The Ecological Rift’: a radical response to capitalism’s war on the planet

John Bellamy Foster, renowned US economist and ecologist, editor of the US socialist journal Monthly Review and author of The Ecological Rift, The Ecological Revolution, The Great Financial Crisis (with Fred Magdoff), Marx’s Ecology; Ecology Against Capitalism, and The Vulnerable Planet, will be a featured international guest at the second World at a Crossroads: Climate Change – Social Change Conference, Friday, September 30 – Monday, October 3, 2011, Melbourne University.

May
3, 2011 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Climate
change is often called the greatest environment threat facing humanity. The
threat is very real. Unless we cut carbon pollution fast, runaway climate
change will worsen existing environmental and social problems, and create new
ones of its own.

But
it’s no longer enough to simply refer to the climate crisis. Climate change is
one part of a broader ecological disaster, brought about by an economic system
that relies on constant growth, endless accumulation and ever-deepening human
alienation.

A
2010 study published in Nature revealed some of the extent of this
ecological crisis. The study, which was led by Sweden’s Johan Rockstrom and
included US climate scientist James Hansen, identified nine “planetary
boundaries” that are critical for human life on the planet.

Along
with climate change, these boundaries are: global freshwater use, chemical
pollution, ocean acidification, land use change, biodiversity (the extinction
rate), ozone levels in the stratosphere, aerosol (or small particle) levels in
the atmosphere and the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles that regulate soil
fertility (and hence food production).

The
study said three of these critical planetary boundaries – climate, the nitrogen
cycle and biodiversity loss – had already been crossed. A further four – land
use change, the phosphorus cycle, ocean acidification and freshwater use – are
emerging problems. The scientists said these boundaries had not yet been
breached, but could be soon if nothing was done.

The
state of the ozone layer, which regulates the ultraviolet radiation from the
sun hitting the Earth, was the only good news. A global treaty to phase out
ozone depleting gasses, such as chlorofluorocarbons, seems to have made a
difference. The study’s authors said they didn’t yet know enough to measure the
planetary boundaries for chemical pollution and aerosol levels.

In
their 2010 book, The Ecological Rift, US Marxists John Bellamy Foster,
Brett Clark and Richard York remark on this study:

The mapping out of planetary boundaries in this way gives
us a better sense of the real threat to the earth system. Although in recent
years the environmental threat has come to be seen by many as simply a question
of climate change, protecting the planet requires that we attend to all of
these planetary boundaries, and others not yet determined.

The essential problem is the unavoidable fact that an
expanding economic system is placing additional burdens on a fixed earth system
to the point of planetary overload … Business as usual projections point to a
state in which the ecological footprint of humanity will be equivalent to the
regenerative capacity of two planets by 2030.

Grow-or-die system

Capitalism,
a grow-or-die system, must ignore the planet’s boundaries. But we cannot afford
to: not if we are to secure a safe planet that can sustain human civilisation.

As
Foster, Clark and York conclude:

No solution to the world’s ecological problem can be
arrived at that does not take the surmounting of capitalism, as an imperialist
world system, as its object. It is time to take the planet back for sustainable
human development.

The Ecological Rift deserves to – and
needs to – become a classic in its field. Dozens and dozens of new books, and
many thousands of papers and articles, are published about the ecological
crisis each year. The literature on the Earth’s growing environmental problems
has become a minor growth industry in itself. But despite the scale of the
crisis, surprisingly few environmentalists in the global North are challenging
their own preconceptions about the present social and economic system, the
causal role it plays in driving ecological decay, and the ways in which the
system can be challenged, overcome and replaced.

Curtis
White zoomed in on this persistent trend in a 2009 article in Orion
magazine:

There is a fundamental question that environmentalists
are not very good at asking, let alone answering: “Why is this, the destruction
of the natural world, happening?” …

But as scientifically sophisticated as environmentalism’s
thinking about natural systems can be (especially its ability to measure change
and make predictions about the future based on those measurements), its
conclusions about human involvement in environmental degradation tend to be
very reductive and causal.

Environmentalism’s analyses tend to be about “sources”.
Industrial sources. Nonpoint sources. Urban sources. Smokestack sources.
Tailpipe sources. Even natural sources (like the soon-to-be-released methane
from thawing Arctic tundra). But environmentalism is not very good at asking, “Okay,
but why do we have all of these polluting sources?”

The Ecological Rift is an exception to
this norm. Its starting point is a frank assessment of the problems, but it
focuses on a sustained critique of the mainstream ecological theories,
solutions and proposals that do not address the root cause of the dilemma, and
that do not deeply investigate why the ecological crisis has reached such dire
proportions.

A
big issue for those concerned with climate change and other environmental ills
is to get a better understanding of the capitalist system, who benefits most
from it and how it works to undermine stable ecosystems.

Rifts and shifts

The
authors describe capitalism as a system of rifts and shifts. Rifts, because its
reliance on short-term profit and endless growth means it must drive an
ever-deepening wedge between human society and the natural conditions needed to
sustain all life.Shifts, because when it’s confronted with
environmental degradation the system tends to simply move it elsewhere. These
shifts are often geographical – toxic, polluting industries are moved out of
urban areas or from the rich nations to the global South. Another example is
how the depletion of natural resources in one region merely drives capital to
expand its reach somewhere else in the globe. The oil industry, which has
expanded offshore drilling operations in the past few decades (think the Gulf
of Mexico) and now wants to drill for oil in the relatively untouched Arctic
Ocean, is a classic example of this kind of geographical shifting characteristic
of capitalism.

But
the shifts are also technological. Capitalism has typically responded to
environmental problems and resource depletion with technical changes in the
methods of production: wood-burning substituted for coal-burning, natural
fertiliser for synthetic fertiliser, paper for plastic, conventional oil for
biofuels, and fossil fuel power plants for nuclear power plants. These changes
have opened up new profitable markets, but have also created new, and more
pressing, ecological rifts. The authors explain:

One way to look at this is to see capitalism as a bubble
economy, which uses up environmental resources and the absorptive capacity of
the environment while displacing the costs back on Earth itself, this incurring
an enormous ecological debt.

As long as the system is relatively small and can keep
expanding outwardly, this ecological debt is displaced, often without any
recognition of the costs that have been incurred. Once the economic system
begins to approach not just its regional boundaries but planetary boundaries,
the mounting ecological debt will become ever more precarious, threatening an
ecological crash.

Yet
the nearness of this crash won’t prompt the system’s rulers to change course.
Environmental destruction is part of capitalism’s DNA.

Capitalism is incapable of regulating its social
metabolism with nature in an environmentally sustainable manner. Its very
operations violate the laws of restitution and metabolic restoration. The
constant drive to renew the capital accumulation process intensifies its
destructive social metabolism, imposing the needs of capital on nature,
regardless of the consequences to natural systems.

Capitalism continues to play out the same failed strategy
again and again. The solution to each environmental problem generates new
environmental problems (and often does not curtail the old ones). One crisis
follows another in an endless succession of failure, stemming from the internal
contradictions of the system. If we are to solve our environmental crises, we
need to go to the root of the problem: the social relations of capital itself.

Mainstream
environmental commentators and groups resist this conclusion. Although they may
be harshly critical of the environmental destruction, they limit their proposals
to what is feasible within the framework of the capitalist system. Sometimes
this is justified on pragmatic grounds – that the ecological crisis is so
advanced that we don’t have time to change the system, and so we need to work
within the flawed system we’ve got. Others have been convinced by the
neoliberal argument that capitalism can be made green and serve ecologically
sensible outcomes – the idea that once environmental goods are adequately
priced, preserving ecosystems can be made profitable and the market could
become the saviour, rather than the destroyer, of the planet. While others
still may acknowledge capitalism’s anti-ecological features, but are either
pessimistic about the potential to change society or think that any other
social system would be even worse.

Green capitalism?

But
Foster, Clark and York argue that these outlooks actually serve to play down
the gravity of the crisis and condemn environmentalists to pursing strategies
that are doomed to fail. They say:

The ecological and social challenges that confront us are
often minimized as the logic of capital goes unquestioned and various reforms
are put forward (such as improving energy efficiency via market incentives)
under the assumption that the system can be tamed to accommodate human needs and
environmental concerns. Such positions fail to acknowledge that the structural
determinations of capital will inevitably grind onwards, threatening to
undermine the conditions of life, unless systematic change is pursued to
eradicate the capital relation entirely.

The Ecological Riftdevotes a lot of
space to a critique of the various green capitalist theories, which contend
market-based solutions to climate change and other environmental problems are
the most efficient and realistic options available. Advocates of these theories
say capitalism is well placed to deliver the technological advances and release
the ingenuity required to restore ecosystems, especially if governments help
out by subsidising new green markets to give them an advantage.

The
most ambitious of these “ecological modernisation” theorists suggest the
capitalism could eventually be dematerialised: that is, transformed from a
system dominated by the production of commodities for profit to a system based
on the exchange of ecologically sound services. Others have argued that
capitalism, which relies on the constant growth and accumulation of capital,
could be reformed into a steady-state economy – an economy that has ceased to
grow.

The
authors reply that a serious failing with these ideas is that they do not
understand, downplay or disregard the fact that any serious challenge to
capitalism’s anti-ecological course would necessarily take the form of a
serious class conflict, a struggle for social and economic power against the powerful
minority that benefit most from the status quo.

“Ecological
modernization theory is”, Foster, Clark and York say, “a functionalist theory
in that that it does not see the emergence of ecological rationality as coming
primarily from social conflict but rather from ecological enlightenment within
the key institutions in societies. Ecological modernization theorists contend,
then, that radical ecological reform does not require social reform – that is,
the institutions of capitalist modernity can avert a global environment crisis
without a fundamental restructuring of the social order, with gradual change in
its operations.”

Consumerism

A
highlight of The Ecological Rift is its chapter on consumers and
consumerism. The most dispirited environmentalists and activists tend to
elevate the high personal consumption and endemic waste of ordinary working
people in the global North as the most intransigent ecological problem of all.
Meanwhile, the most naive environmentalists argue that enlightened consumer
choices are the solution and that consumer behaviour has the power to determine
how the capitalist market operates.

There
is no question that mass consumption, and the alienating consumer culture it
has given rise to, has a very serious ecological impact. But Foster, Clark and
York discuss the rise of the mass consumer society in its proper context.
Consumerism is not so much the cause of ecological decay, but is another
symptom of capitalism’s drive to expand itself at all costs. And before anyone
rushes to blame the shoppers crowding the supermarket aisles or the commuters
idling in traffic jams for heedlessly pushing the planet’s ecology towards
oblivion, the authors ask us to take deeper look at who the real mega-consumers
are.

Indeed, the class reality in the United States and the
discrepancies in environmental impact that result are far from more startling
than official consumption figures suggest. A relatively small portion of the
population (around 10 percent) owns 90 percent of the financial and real estate
assets (and thereby the productive assets) of the country, and the rest of
society essentially rents itself out to the owners. The wealthiest 400
individuals (the so-called Forbes 400) in the United States have a combined
level of wealth roughly equal to that of the bottom half of the population, or
150 million people. The top 1 percent of US households in 2000 had roughly the
same share (20 percent) of US national income as the bottom 60 percent of the
population. Such facts led a group of Citigroup researchers and investment
counselors to characterize the United States as a “plutonomy”, a society driven
in all aspects by the rich. In this view, the “average consumer” is a
meaningless entity, since the consumption is increasingly dominated by the
luxury consumption of the rich, who also determine production and investment
decisions.

And
it’s next to meaningless to discuss the ecological impacts of consumerism without
paying attention to advertising (easily the most far-reaching, manipulative and
successful mass propaganda system devised in world history) and its evil twin,
planned obsolescence.

The entire system of marketing, in which trillions of
dollars are spent persuading individuals to buy commodities for which they have
no need, and no initial desire, would have to be dismantled if the object were
to generate a genuine ecology of consumption. Today’s gargantuan marketing
system (which now includes detailed data on every US household) is the most
developed system of propaganda ever seen, a product of the growth in the
twentieth century of monopoly capitalism. It is not a system for expanding
choice but for controlling it in the interest of promoting ever-greater levels
of sales at higher profits …The production of high-quality goods increases
production costs and decreases sales (since the products thereby do not have to
be replaced as often) and this goes against the goals of capital. The general
thrust is the production of commodities that are inexpensive and low quality
and frequently replaced. In recent decades, the consumer trap has merged with
the debt trap in which ordinary working people are more and more enmeshed –
part of the growth in our time of monopoly-finance capital – in their attempts
simply to maintain their “standards of living”.

Ecological revolution

The
final section of The Ecological Rift, titled “Ways Out”, includes
some interesting conjecture on what groups and social forces might be the main
agents of the ecological revolution that the authors call for.

It is conceivable that the main historic agent and
initiator of a new epoch of ecological revolution is to be found in the third
world masses most directly in line to be hit first by the impending disasters.
Today the ecological front line is arguably to be found in the
Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta and the low-lying fertile coast area of the Indian
Ocean and China Seas – the state of Kerala in India, Thailand, Vietnam,
Indonesia. The inhabitants of these cases, as in the case of Marx’s
proletariat, have nothing to lose from the radical changes necessary to avert
(or adapt to) disaster. In fact, with the universal spread of capitalist social
relations and the commodity form, the world proletariat and the masses most
exposed to sea-level rise – for example, in the low-lying delta of the Pearl
River and the Guangdong industrial region from Shenzhen to Guangzhou –
sometimes overlap. This, then, potentially constitutes the global epicenter of
a new environmental proletariat.

Of
course, this passage amounts to a thoughtful speculation, not a prediction. The
first decisive breaks with capitalism and imperialism may well occur in Latin
America or the Middle East, regions that have also borne the impacts of
colonialism and imperialism, and which are also arguably already in the
ecological front line. But Foster, Clark and York’s emphasis on “a new
environmental proletariat” reflects their belief that environmental concerns
will play a crucial role in future revolutionary upheavals against the system.

The
authors insist, however, that “the planetary crisis we are now caught up in …
requires a world uprising transcending all geographical boundaries”, including
the advanced capitalist nations. They say:

This means that ecological and social revolutions in the
third world have to be accompanied by, or inspire, universal revolts again
imperialism, the destruction of the planet, and the treadmill of accumulation.
The recognition that the weight of environmental disaster is such that it would
cross all class lines and all nations and positions, abolishing time itself by
breaking what Marx called “the chain of successive generations”, could lead to
a radical rejection of the engine of destruction on which we live, and put into
motion a new conception of global humanity and earth metabolism. As always,
real change will have to come from those most alienated from the existing
systems of power and wealth. The most hopeful development within the advanced
capitalist world at present is the meteoric rise of the youth-based climate
justice movement, which is emerging as a considerable force in direct action
mobilization and in challenging the current climate negotiations.

How
exactly such a “universal revolt” against capitalism can be brought into being
cannot be answered by any book. It can only be discovered through struggle. And
engaging in a struggle aimed at ecological revolution is, it itself, no
guarantee of success. But if people-centred solutions to the ecological crisis
are sidelined we can guarantee that the capitalist elites will impose their own
barbaric solutions, solutions that will have even greater human and ecological
costs. This means, in a sense, that we’ve all got our backs to the wall. The
Ecological Rift makes clear that the world’s workers and poor are left with
no other option – we’ve got to fight.